It is important that when medicine is prescribed for an individual to treat a medical condition, the correct dosage of the medicine should be taken at certain specified times to prevent the level of medication in the body from falling below a desired therapeutic level. Unfortunately, medical professionals have found that people often forget to take their medicine on time. Sometimes they miss one or more doses entirely. This is a particularly a problem with the elderly, who often become confused or absent-minded when trying to keep track of whether they have taken the correct does of each of a number of medications at the correct times.
Thus, there is a need for devices which store individual doses of pills or tablets in separate compartments. Each compartment should be labeled so that the user can tell at what day and/or time the dosage in that compartment should be taken. For example, pills to be taken on Monday can be stored in a first compartment; pills to be taken on Tuesday can be stored in a second compartment; and so on. This allows the patient to readily determine what pills should be taken at what time, and to readily check to determine whether those pills have in fact been taken.
A number of devices of this type have been developed. Pill containers having seven compartments (one for each day of the week), each of which may be individually accessed through a separate hinged door, are well known. U.S. Pat. No. 4,381,059, issued to Schurman on Apr. 26, 1983, discloses a cylindrical pill container having stacks of radially-directed compartments adapted to store individual doses of medicament(s). The pills are removed from the container through a sliding door in the side wall of the cylindrical container. The door is moved from one radial compartment to the next radial compartment by rotating the side wall relative to the radially-directed compartments. However, the structure of the container is relatively complicated, and a simplified structure is desirable. Additionally, it is desirable to have a door mechanism which allows the user to access only one compartment in a stack of radially directed compartments. The door in Schurman's device can only allow access to the third compartment from the bottom in a desired row of radially-directed compartments by sliding past the first and second compartments. If the door is withdrawn too far, medication stored in the third and fourth compartments may accidentally be removed together.
The objective of this invention is to provide a multi-compartment pill storage container having a simplified structure.